The following is the Q&A with Mead and Wengrofsky.

Stranger Than Fiction: Watching that I was thinking about how you had this big moment on the West Coast, in San Francisco, and yet you’ve always been a figure of the New York scene. Did you ever see yourself staying in San Francisco? What did you draw from those two different cities?

Taylor Mead: San Francisco is too damn cold at five in the evening. I spent six months and made one or two great films in San Francisco. But I also spent three and a half years in L.A., and went to the Pasadena Playhouse many years before. And lived literally on Venice Beach for a couple of years. That’s my California trip.

STF: New York City obviously had some kind of hold on you. What was it about New York that caused you to make it your home?

Mead: I had come down from boarding school in Connecticut, I was very overawed by New York. Hitchiking the country, I tried to get around New York—this was in the 40s, during the war. Anyway, the bus went through the Upper West Side, and I saw people sitting on their stoop minding their own business. I come from a very prominent family in Michigan, my father was the fucking boss of Michigan. So I couldn’t cruise Detroit. And I saw these people minding their own business, and it was New York in the 40s. I thought, this is where I belong. But the bus wouldn’t stop until Provincetown, which was almost too gay for me. So I got back to New York and I slept in Central Park and all over and begged and everything.

STF: Jeffrey, Taylor was in The Flower Thief, a piece of iconography from the beatnik era. When you approached him to make a film some 50 years later, was there any intimidation factor to make a film about someone so celebrated in the early days of independent cinema.

Jeffrey Wengrofsky: I don’t think of my film as being in competition with anyone else’s film. For me, I just thought of it as an opportunity to make some art. It’s part of a series. There are 10 films, each focusing on a different artist, on a different aspect of the intersection of their life and art.

STF: Taylor, you do so many things, as a poet—

Mead: Oh, I have a show at the Churner and Churner gallery on 10th Avenue and 22nd Street, a great show of 20 of my paintings. Most of them have been sold years ago. But go anyway.

Wengrofsky: Some of the paintings are in the film. So if you go, and I encourage you to go—in fact, this film, The Party in Taylor Mead’s Kitchen, will be shown there February 10.

Mead: I made a hundred and some movies. I’m all over Google. I’m the biggest thing in Google.

STF: So my last question, do you think of yourself primarily as a poet, as a painter, as an actor?

Mead: I’m a drifter in the arts. But every Monday at 6:30 I’m at the Bowery Poetry Club, courtesy of Bob Holman, husband of the late Elizabeth Murray.

The following is the Q&A with van der Borch and Bettina.

STF: Bettina, you’ve now seen the film a couple of times with audiences. So much of this film is about an artist working without appreciation and recognition. I wonder what it’s like for you to get a little more recognition with this film?

Bettina: Well, I could hear some people laughing and having a good time, so that was wonderful.

STF: Corrine, can you bring us up to date. Since this film was made the Chelsea Hotel itself has gone through some changes. It’s been sold and a lot of residents have been cleared out. Can you describe what your experience of it has been.

Corrine van der Borch: It’s a ghost house. There’s a handful of people living there. One of them is Bettina, and everyone is living behind plastic zippers, so it’s like walking into a science fiction film. It’s very awkward. The art has disappeared from all of the walls. Bettina told me the owner thought he bought all of the art with the hotel, but you think he has not, correct?

Bettina: The new owner thought he had bought the art when he gave them a certain price for the hotel. Then it turns out the hotel didn’t know about it.

STF: A complicated situation.

Van der Borch: It’s very complicated, yes.

STF: Talk to me about some of the thought’s you’ve had about preserving Bettina’s art and doing other things with it.

Van der Borch: I’ve had many thoughts on how to help Bettina. I’m very honored that this film is getting recognition and that Bettina is getting recognition. But I think there’s a lot more that needs to be done. I have an idea, I want to through it out there. But maybe I would like Bettina to talk about a project in her boxes for more than 30 years.

Bettina: I’ve been working on a film about New York City for a very long time. It’s all about phenomenology, you saw part of it in Corrine’s film. I went all over New York City with tracks and wheels and a tripod, carrying everything on my back. No money for taxis, no subways. It’s ready for transfer now, this is 30 years later. It’s still in good condition.

Van der Borch: It’s basically a Super 8 film that Bettina made back in the days that I’m dying to see. I hope everyone that sees this film also might be dying to see. My idea is to start a campaign online and get some crowd funding going and hopefully get the money together to get it digitized, edited and back onto something presentable. I have no idea how I should do this, and if anyone is interested to help out you can like our Facebook page. I really want to stay in touch with the people who are interested, for Bettina’s sake.

STF: We’ve talked to some archivists about doing work with this, so we hope to have more news in coming months.

Audience: How did the title come about, what was it about black balloons?

Bettina: One of my neighbors went to a party and they gave me black balloons. He thought I could use them and gave them over to me. I immediately put them on my car, as it were, and drove around New York with them. I used to go over to the river to get some fresh air in the summer. I have a lot of fun when I’m out.

Van der Borch: Bettina’s a girl, we all know that now that we’ve met her. The black balloons were just something that happened to float by. It was basically how she floated by me in the hotel.  But they also carry some weight by them being black. And I think if someone carries weight, it is Bettina. So I felt it was a good title. Also, it’s like the name of a still picture.

Audience: What happened with Sam, the neighbor. What did you think of him?

Bettina: Sam made his film about Bettina also, and maybe you will get another chance to see that. He doesn’t live in the building anymore because everybody had to leave.

Van der Borch: He is somewhere on the West Coast now, right?

Bettina: No, he was on the West Coast, and now he’s somewhere else.

Audience: Can you talk a little bit about the editing process. How much footage did you have, and what was it like constructing the story.

Van der Borch: We should give the editor of the film, Laura Minear a really big applause. I shot for over two years and I had 35 tapes, roundabout. I constantly looked back when I was shooting to see if what Bettina said made sense. Because shooting and doing sound and doing everything is a lot from a filmmaking perspective, to also grasp what is in front of you. A lot made sense. It was so overwhelming to be doing everything that I found Laura, and she was my partner in crime for a while over the summer. We created and crafted this story out of two and a half years.

Audience: Did you already know you were going to do narration, and did you already have in mind the framing devices, like the staircases?

Van der Borch: Did I know ahead of time what I was doing? No. I knew I wanted to make something intimate. I knew I wanted to do something with the structures of the stairwell. I always told Bettina I was doing a film about the stairwell, remember? I realized I was a character in the film, so we had to work on that, that’s how the narration came about. The dreams, I actually had, they’re not written or made up. Bettina was under my skin.

STF: Bettina, in the course of the film you see a lot of resistance from you to the process. Are you pleased with the outcome?

Bettina: Resistance to what?

STF: To the process of Corrine filming you. Is that fair to say?

Bettina: No, no. Was that fair to say? I wasn’t resistant. Was I? There are too many beautiful things out in New York that I go to visit a lot, and I was not resistant to having it recorded.

Van der Borch: I think the timing was right. Bettina not only had me in her life but also Sam, she had two filmmakers, so I would walk out and he would walk in. That’s the way it was for a while. But I do feel like you had some resistance to who was in control. I thought I was in control, but now I think I was not in control and I should not have been because you were in control.

Bettina: I have a resistance to being controlled, yes.

Van der Borch: So did I.

Audience: Was it really difficult after the hotel changed ownership?

Bettina: The process is extremely difficult—very, very difficult. No one knows who is going to continue living there, and who is going to be forced out. It’s difficult. And of course, they’re removing all the pipes now. The pipes had asbestos in them, it’s all over. Vile stuff.

Audience: Is your studio still intact now?

Bettina: My studio is intact. The people who are permanently residents there, they are still there. The other rooms are all whitewashed doorways with black x’s on them and padlocks. And solitude.

STF: It’s an uncertain future.

Bettina: An uncertain future.

Van der Borch: How do you feel about that?

Bettina: Oh, I love it.

Sundance also suffered its own tragic loss this year, with the death of indie exec Bingham Ray, who passed away after suffering a series of strokes. Eugene Hernandez, director of digital strategy for the Film Society of Lincoln Center and a friend of Ray’s, took a look at his life, and the seismic changes his passion for film wrought on the industry. Hernandez also shared with Indiewire an interview with Ray conducted the previous month. Sasha Bronner, a Ray protege, also offered her own encomium at the Huffington Post.

A little to the left of Utah, the folks at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally released the list of long-awaited Oscar nominations on January 24. The feature docs that hit the Academy’s inscrutable nomination bar were Danfaung Dennis’s HELL AND BACK AGAIN; IF A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT, by Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman; PARADISE LOST 3: PURGATORY, by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky; Wim Wenders’s PINA; and UNDEFEATED, by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin. News of the nomination for PARADISE LOST sparked criticism from the parents of several of the boys whose murders are indirectly investigated in the film. Todd and Diane Moore had asked the Academy in late 2011 to exclude PARADISE LOST from consideration for an Oscar in an open letter. Following the Academy’s nominations announcement, they again expressed their “sadness, disappointment, and outrage.”

The five films nominated by the Academy in the documentary short subject category were THE BARBER OF BIRMINGHAM: FOOT SOLDIER OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT by the late Gail Dolgin and Robin Fryday; GOD IS THE BIGGER ELVIS by Rebecca Cammisa and Julie Anderson; THE TSUNAMI AND THE CHERRY BLOSSOM by Lucy Walker; INCIDENT IN NEW BAGHDAD by James Spione; and SAVING FACE by Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. Walker also picked up the jury prize for best non-fiction short film at Sundance for TSUNAMI, a day after earning her Oscar nomination.

As always, please send tips and recommendations to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Have a great week!

Submarine Films Co-President Josh Braun, who repped VERSAILLES, SUGAR MAN and ME @THE ZOO at Sundance, on Saturday said he thinks there are several titles being shopped at the festival that could do well at the box office, and that there’s “a strong appetite for high quality theatrical docs.” He added, “Not to be overly simplistic, but if I like the films, I imagine someone else will too.” There’s been a slight lull in acquisitions at Sundance since Friday, so it remains to be seen if distributors are playing a wait-and-see game before shelling out for other docs.

Also making it’s “debut” in Sundance’s New Frontier category was the affecting interactive doc BEAR 71, by artists Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison. The doc, which relies on a trove of data collected on a bear traveling through the Canadian Rockies, can be experienced online at the National Film Board of Canada’s website.

For those filmmakers lacking the means to trek to Sundance for networking purposes, DocumentaryTelevision.com’s Peter Hamilton has provided a useful list of tips for pitching your project.

In awards news, the British Acadamy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) on January 17 released its list of nominations for the Orange British Academy Film Awards. Asif Kapadia’s SENNA made a strong showing, earning nods in four categories: best film, outstanding British film, best documentary and best editing. The two other nominees for best doc were Martin Scorsese’s GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD, and James Marsh’s PROJECT NIM. Wim Wenders’s PINA also picked up a nomination for film not in the English language. The awards ceremony is set to take place on February 12.

Tomorrow will also see the release of the list of Oscar nominations. At the New York Times, John Anderson took a look at the Academy’s history of handing out nominations that seem incongruous with the list of films that have picked up critical plaudits and positive attention on the festival circuit. Anderson concludes that, even under the Academy’s new nomination and voting process for docs, feel-good stories will continue to dominate over more ambiguous works. “Tougher films, complex documentaries about challenging subjects, will be at a disadvantage against films that make voters feel good, or at least ennobled, when they vote for them,” he writes.

Elsewhere, Iranian filmmaker Marjan Safinia on January 17 was elected board president of the International Documentary Association (IDA), replacing outgoing president Eddie Schmidt, who retired from the board. Safinia, who directed the short BUT YOU SPEAK SUCH GOOD ENGLISH (1999), is a constant presence on documentary forum The D-Word, where she is one of the site’s four co-hosts.

Christopher Campbell at the Documentary Channel blog has this week’s roundup of theatrical releases, which includes STF alum THE PRUITT-IGOE MYTH by Chad Freidrich, which is getting a run at the IFC Center in New York City.

Those living in New York City can also take advantage of a rare screening of ON THE POLE WITH EDDIE SACHS (1960), which is showing Tuesday, January 24 at 7:30 p.m. at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem. The film, a Drew Associates production, was shot by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles. Both Maysles and Robert Drew will be in attendance at the screening for a Q&A.

Stranger Than Fiction’s Winter Season is set to kick off January 31 with Corrine van der Borch’s GIRL WITH BLACK BALLOONS, which will be preceded by the 11 minute short THE PARTY IN TAYLOR MEAD’S KITCHEN, by Jeffrey Wengrofsky. Both directors, as well as film subjects Bettina and Taylor Mead, will be at the screening. You can get more information and tickets here. STF season passes, which will get you into all eight movies, along with free popcorn and a free DVD, are still available for $100 ($80 for IFC members—cheap!).

Please send tips and recommendations for the Monday Memo to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Stranger Than Fiction: I’d like to ask you about the circumstances making this film, and the legal situation that resulted when you tried to distribute the film.

Frederick Wiseman: I had permission, obviously, to make the film. You don’t parachute into Bridgewater in the middle of the night and leave at dawn. I had permission from the lieutenant governor, who was in charge of the prison system, the commissioner of corrections and the superintendent at Bridgewater. The lieutenant governor who arranged for me to make the film was Elliot Richardson, who went on to greater fame in Watergate and the Nixon Administration. When the film was finished I showed it to all of those people and they liked it. Then the reviews began to appear and the reviews were critical of the state of Massachusetts for allowing Bridgewater to exist. And a social worker who lived in Minnesota who had formerly lived in Massachusetts wrote a letter to the governor of Massachusetts expressing her horror at the fact that there were naked men shown in the film. It was the first the governor had heard of the film. The attorney general at that point was Eliott Richardson, because in the year between the time the film was shot and the time it was released Richardson had become attorney general. Richardson wanted to run for either governor or the Senate, and he thought his political career would be damaged when it became known he had been instrumental in my getting permission. He had the choice of either supporting the film and saying, yeah let Wiseman make the film because Bridgewater was a pretty horrible place and we wanted to have the public aware of it so perhaps the legislature would appropriate more money. But he made the other choice, which was to protect himself, and got an injunction preventing the film from being shown in Massachusetts. He tried to prevent it from being shown in New York and failed, because New York courts wouldn’t accept it. Then there was a legislative hearing to determine how I got permission to make the film, which was really an effort by the Democrats in the Massachusetts legislature to get Richardson. Then there was a trial in Massachusetts, and there were three principle points in the trial. First, that I had breached the privacy of Jim, the man shown naked in his cell. Two, that I had breached an oral contract giving the state editorial control over the film. And three, that the receipts should be held in a trust for the benefit of the inmates. I won on the trust issue, which was what they call a pyrrhic victory since there were no receipts. The court found that the right of privacy existed in Massachusetts. It was the first time the right had been found to exist in the state, because the right either exists as a result of the legislature, or common law tradition. The judge ordered the negative be burnt and described the film as a nightmare of ghoulish obscenities. The case was appealed to the Mass Supreme Court, which said the film had value, but could only be seen by limited audiences consisting of doctors, lawyers, judges, legislators, people interested in custodial care and students in these and related fields, but not the merely curious general public. I could show the film on condition that I give the court and attorney general’s office a week’s notice of any screening, and then file an affidavit after that everybody who saw the film fell into the class of people allowed to see the film. That would require a personal police force, so the film was never shown. Then, around 1973, there was a new attorney general for Massachusetts, and he amended the restraining order and allowed me to rely on someone else’s representations. So if a college wanted to show the film and represented to me that the audience consisted of the allowable class of people, I could then rely on that and file a requisite affidavit. So the film was shown quite a bit on campuses and in public libraries. And then in the mid 80s, the original judge died—there was a headline in the Boston Globe that read, “Titicut Follies Judge Dead.” I wasn’t disappointed to read that. I brought another case asking that a new judge reconsider. The new judge appointed a lawyer to investigate whether the showing of the film would harm the surviving inmates. At that point, there were 31 surviving inmates. He determined that if the film were shown it would not only not hurt them, but benefit them. The judge then said I could show the film if I blanked out the faces of the inmates. I refused to do that and appealed. He finally reconsidered and said the film was protected by the First Amendment, and the film was shown. I barely resisted when the film was shown in a theater in Boston to put on the marquee, “A Nightmare of Ghoulish Obscenities.” That’s sort of the short version of the story.

STF: In 1967, when you were shooting this film, did you have any idea that you would, on and off, spend 24 years fighting for your film to get seen.

Wiseman: No, of course not. Also, I was very naive.

STF: How did going through that experience affect your work in the future as a filmmaker?

Wiseman: It confirmed me in my view that Duck Soup was a documentary.

STF: One of the scenes in this film that I think catches everybody’s attention is the forcefeeding scene. The way that it’s edited, the parallel narrative—you’re cutting back and forth between the forcefeeding and the same inmate’s body being prepared for embalming. It was something that was not common editing.

Wiseman: Well I wouldn’t do it now, I think it was a mistake. It forces the issue too much. At the time, I thought it was terrific. But now it embarrasses me. It forces the issue in the sense that it’s too heavy handed editorially. It would have been better, I think, to show the force feeding, and then a couple of sequences later, show the guy being made up for his funeral. Then you could come to the conclusion yourself that he was treated better in death than in life. The way I edited it, it’s heavy handed.

STF: People refer to your work as observational cinema, or verite or direct cinema, and I understand that you don’t care for any of these terms.

Wiseman: Well, I don’t know what they mean. As far as I’m concerned, I make movies. That’s a good enough designation.

STF: Do you have a philosophy to your filmmaking?

Wiseman: Shoot a lot of film, and find the story in the editing. That’s very deep.

STF: Works for us. Over the course of your career you’ve made films at a lot of different institutions that, taken as a whole, give us a look at our entire society. Is there an important institution of our society that you haven’t been able to hit?

Wiseman: Oh yeah, lots.

STF: Any that you still think about chronicling?

Wiseman: The White House, the CIA, the FBI. You know, I’d never get permission. There’s an inexhaustible list of subjects. I don’t think even in one lifetime you could do all possibilities. Even if I’d started when I was six.

STF: I wish you had started at six.

Wiseman: Me too.

Audience: What happened to Vladimir?

Wiseman: He got out of Bridgewater maybe eight or nine years after the film was made. He then went to work in Brockton, Massachusetts at a supermarket and died a few years later. When he got out of prison I invited him to come and see the film. He liked the film, which pleased me. He was a nice man—the scene with Vladimir is really the key scene of the film as far as I’m concerned. It’s clear that Vladimir is sick, but it’s also quite clear that he’s not getting any treatment at Bridgewater, or any useful treatment, I guess.

Audience: Was the film begun as an advocacy project?

Wiseman: In the mid-70s, long after Richardson had gone to greater glory, there was a new prison built, and a lot of prisoners at Bridgewater who had been there for many years—some for 40 or 50 or 60 years—were discharged. The prison population went down from about 900 to about 350. They had a modern building and the medical and psychiatric services were provided by a consortium of the teaching hospitals in the Boston area. That persisted for a number of years, 15 or 20 years. Then the medical schools lost the contract and it was given to a group of private doctors. And I’ve been told, although I don’t know this from my own experience, that the quality of care has deteriorated. That’s what I heard, I don’t know that for a fact.

Audience: How did your experience with Titicut Follies change the way you approach the different institutions to get permission?

Wiseman: Well, I approached it the same way, in the sense that I asked for permission, and then afterward wrote a letter summarizing what my understanding was. And then I asked whoever I was dealing with, usually the head of the institution, to sign the letter, which became an informal contract which stated how the film was going to be shot, where it might be shown, how it was going to be edited, and that I would have complete control over it. In the Follies, I tried to get written releases from everybody, and I got them from many people. But there were some people that I didn’t get releases for, not because they refused, but because in the press of events I didn’t get them, by negligence really. At the trial, that was made to appear as if they had turned me down. For all subsequent films I never got written releases, but I get tape recorded consents. Sometimes before the sequence is shot, but most often after the sequence is shot. And that, in Massachusetts, is valid. I explain that I’m tape recording, and explain, basically, the same kind of things that are in the letter, and ask them to give their assent. It’s very rare that anyone turns me down.

STF: You studied law before becoming a filmmaker—

Wiseman: Well, my little joke about that is that I was physically present in law school. It’s the word study that I had a problem with.

STF: Do you think an understanding of the law is beneficial to filmmakers?

Wiseman: I think the fact that I went to law school sometimes intimidates people in contractual negotiations, but I don’t think it’s had any effect on the way I make the films or anything else.

Audience: Has your method of making films changed over the years, in regard to production and also in regard to how you carry yourself in the spaces you’re filming in?

Wiseman: Basically, it’s the same system. I’d like to think that over the course of the years I’ve learned something about how to make a film. And I think I’ve learned most about how to make a film because I edit them myself. When you’re editing one film and don’t have the shot you need, you tend to remember to get the shot the next time you’re out and in a similar situation. Basically, it’s pretty much the same system. Small crew, I don’t do any research. The shooting is the research. Shoot a lot of film, anywhere from—the least is 75 hours, the most is 250, and figure it out in the editing. I don’t even begin to think about structure until I’m seven or eight months into the editing, when I’ve edited all of the so-called sequences that I think might make it into the film. When I’ve got all those candidate sequences hanging on the wall, then I work out the first structure in three or four days. Then I have an assembly, and it takes me six or seven weeks to arrive at the final form of the film. At that point, it’s mainly working on the rhythm, the internal rhythm within the sequence, and the relationship between the sequences. Then the last thing I do is look at all of the rushes to see if there’s anything that I’ve forgotten that might solve a problem that I haven’t resolved.

Audience: When you were filming, especially when men were naked, did you ever feel moments of awkwardness, as if you were complicit in their humiliation?

Wiseman: No, I’d seen naked men before. No, I thought the fact that many men were kept naked in their cells at Bridgewater was an important part of the subject. There was no reason, for example, that they couldn’t have paper suits. The rationale for keeping them naked was that they were suicidal. A principle other reason was that they were incontinent, or some of them were incontinent. Some of them may have been incontinent in response to the way they were kept. But even if they were incontinent they could have been given a paper suit, because a paper suit is easy to take off. It was really that the guards objected, it was messier to deal with a fouled paper suit.

Audience: Do you follow the rest of the contemporary documentary scene, and if you do, what you think about other documentaries.

Wiseman: I don’t go to the movies very much, I don’t have time.

Audience: Obviously this was shot on film, was Crazy Horse also shot on film?

Wiseman: No, Crazy Horse was shot on HD. I can’t get the money to shoot on film. It’s hard enough to get the money to shoot on HD. There’s such an enormous difference. Forty-eight minutes of HD is about $40. And 48 minutes of film is about $1,100.

STF: You also previously made the jump to color from black and white for technical reasons, because the color stocks were faster. But do you ever get the itch to shoot in black and white again?

Wiseman: Near Death was shot in black and white, and The Last Letter, which is a fiction film, was also shot in black and white. I wanted to do Ballet in black and white because I thought it would be more stylized, I thought it would look better in black and white. But we looked at the rushes the first day shooting, and they were unusable because the light was so bad. We went back the next day with fast color stock and it was fine.

Audience: What period of time did you spend in Bridgewater?

Wiseman: Twenty-nine days over a period of three months.

Audience: I’m wondering about the follies themselves, and when you came over that. It’s just such an amazing built-in metaphor. Did you know early on that it was going to be the open and close of the film, the title of the film?

Wiseman: When I planned to shoot the film, I knew they were rehearsing and performing Titicut Follies. They did it annually, and they continued to do it after the movie was made, but they changed the name of the show. Titicut is actually an old Indian name and Bridgewater, the prison, was on Titicut Street. There’s nothing prurient about the title.

Audience: What was it like to shoot this movie, because watching this movie makes you feel kind of crazy? What was it like for you going to work to shoot?

Wiseman: It was really interesting. I basically couldn’t stay away. It was certainly a strange experience but it was a fascinating one. But that’s always the experience because all these worlds, which are the subject of the film, most of them, with the exception of High School and Basic Training, are new to me. The fact that you’re working is also a kind of defense against some of the horrible things that you’re seeing. That makes it easier to deal with emotionally.

In other categories, Gian-Piero Ringel and Wim Wenders took home the award for Outstanding Acheivement in Production for PINA (Wenders pulled double duty as the film’s director). The editing award went to Gregers Sall and Chris King for their work on SENNA. Accepting the award on their behalf, SENNA director Asif Kapadia said the film had drawn on an astounding 15,000 hours of raw footage.

Photojournalist Danfung Dennis scored the cinematography award for his debut feature, HELL AND BACK AGAIN. Errol Morris’s TABLOID picked up two awards—one for best original music score, which went to composer John Kusiak, and another to Rob Feng and Jeremy Landman for Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Animation. Clio Bernard’s hybrid doc, THE ARBOR, was named the best debut feature, while Cindy Meehl and her crew took home the audience award for BUCK. The spotlight award, intended to highlight a film that went largely overlooked during the year, went to Tatiana Huezo Sanchez for her film, THE TINIEST PLACE.

After taking the stage to receive the Legacy Award for canon film TITICUT FOLLIES, Frederick Wiseman reflected on his decades-long career. “I’m continuing to slog away on making these documentaries, and it’s very nice indeed to have the recognition of this award for the first film that I did.” Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were joined by an ecstatic Jason Baldwin, a recently freed member of the West Memphis Three, who helped the filmmakers accept the new Hell Yeah Prize for their work on The Paradise Lost Trilogy. Sinofsky, after accepting the award, recalled a moment that occurred the day after Baldwin was freed, when Baldwin asked if he could say grace at breakfast. “That was one of the high moments in my life,” he said.

Sinofsky and Berlinger also joined James in picking up a DGA nomination for outstanding directorial achievement for PARADISE LOST 3: PURGATORY. The other DGA award nominees are Martin Scorsese for GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD; James Marsh for PROJECT NIM; and Richard Press for BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK.

The impending kickoff of the Sundance Film Festival, set to begin January 19, was marred for one documentarian by news that David Siegel, a real estate developer and subject of Sundance-selected doc THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLE, had filed suit against the Sundance Institute and director Laura Greenfield, as well as her husband. Siegel in his suit alleged that Sundance and Greenfield had defamed him by describing his real estate business as collapsed in the film’s promotional materials.

Sundance highlighted three docs screening at the festival that are linked by their examination of the decline of the American dream—DETROPIA, an examination of the decline of the Motor City by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady; FINDING NORTH, by Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson, which looks at the problem of hunger in America; and THE HOUSE I LIVE IN, about the toll taken on society by illicit drugs, by Eugene Jarecki. All three films were among the 16 U.S. documentaries in competition at Sundance that were to premiere at the festival. They are to be complemented by 12 other films in World Cinema Documentary Competition category. The world category also included Fredrik Gertten’s BIG BOYS GONE BANANAS!*, a film documenting Gertten’s own court battles with giant fruit corporation Dole, which took umbrage at their unflattering profile in Gertten’s earlier work, BANANAS!*, and filed suit against the filmmaker.

Across the pond, news broke that British satellite broadcaster BSkyB, which is partially owned by Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media behemoth News Corp., was dropping Current UK from its lineup, potentially spelling an end for the channel in the British Isles. Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt took BSkyB to task for its decision, claiming that “Sky is once again discriminating in favor of the networks it owns and the points of view News Corporation agrees with.”

A little closer to STF’s home, the Tribeca Film Institute named eleven works in progress to its Tribeca All Access program, five of which were documentaries. Among those making the cut was director Rahmin Bahrani, who has previously won plaudits for his narrative feature work, but who will participate in the All Access program for his work on an as-yet untitled doc about gold.

The folks at Creative Capital on January 12 named a slew of filmmakers as recipients of grants dedicated to Film/Video and Visual Arts, doling out funds to a total of 56 artists, among them POV series producer Yance Ford.

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Basil Tsiokos has curated a number of documentaries inspired by the civil rights leader that are screening online at Hulu.com.

Documentary Channel blogger Christopher Campbell breaks down this week’s theatrical releases, led by Frederick Wiseman’s CRAZY HORSE, a portrait of the eponymously named Parisian cabaret, which is opening January 18 at NYC’s Film Forum. STF Artistic Director Thom Powers described the film thusly: “In CRAZY HORSE, Wiseman pulls back the curtain on Le Crazy Horse de Paris, a landmark that has prided itself as “the best nude dancing show in the world” since 1951. Le Crazy Horse sets itself apart from the average strip club by adhering to exacting standards in choreography, lights and physiques. The erotic revue is composed of songs and sequences that blend traits of old-fashioned burlesque, Bob Fosse and Cirque du Soleil — designed not only for the enjoyment of men, but also couples.”

STF is also hosting a pre-season screening of Wiseman’s TITICUT FOLLIES at the IFC on January 17. While the 8 p.m. screening is already sold out, due to overwhelming demand STF has added a second screening that will be introduced by Wiseman. You can get info and tickets here. Also, STF Winter Season passes, which will get you into TITICUT FOLLIES (while seats still last) as well as eight other films, along with free popcorn and a free Docurama DVD, all for $100 ($80 for IFC members). To buy a pass go here.

As always, we welcome your tips and recommendations. They can be sent to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Have a great week!